Desktop/Design/Guidelines

All submissions or contributions

• Should be covered by the Contributor License Agreement.

We cannot accept contributions from individuals who have not signed the CLA in the Fedora Account System. The CLA allows us to properly license artwork submissions for distribution with Fedora and other Fedora projects.

• Must not contain material that violates or infringes another’s rights, including but not limited to privacy, publicity or intellectual property rights, or that constitutes copyright infringement

If your submissions include or derive from artwork created by other people, please make sure the license of the original work you incorporate is compatible with Fedora and that you are not violating any of the provisions of its license. Just because a work is licensed with a Creative Commons license does not mean it is free to use (make sure you provide attribution to artists that license their work with a CC Attribution clause.)

• Should have the consent and approval of the author or creator

• Are thereby licensed to the public for reuse under CC-BY-SA unless specifically identified as being licensed by another approved liberal open source license.

Subject matter

• Must not contain brand names or trademarks of any kind

• Must not contain material that is inappropriate, offensive, indecent, obscene, hateful, tortuous, defamatory, slanderous or libelous
  • No sexually explicit or provocative subject matter
  • No images of weapons or violent imagery
  • No alcohol, smoking, or drug use imagery

• Must not contain material that promotes bigotry, racism, hatred or harm against any group or individual or promotes discrimination based on race, gender, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age

• Must not contain material that is unlawful, in violation of or contrary to the laws or regulations in the jurisdiction where the work is created

• No religious, political, or nationalist imagery (including flags)

• No images of hats, particularly fedoras.

This is a matter of respect for our primary sponsor, Red Hat, Inc., and is not negotiable. Of course, passive appearance of hats, such as those upon heads in a crowd, may be allowed.

• No version numbers.

End users might prefer to continue to use an older theme, or use the latest theme in their older version of Fedora. To enable that choice, do not use any version numbers within the Fedora artwork.

• No text.

Text should not be used in the backgrounds because the artwork is intended for a global audience and to be reused by derivative distributions. Limited, artistic, use of typography may be permitted.

• Should not contain images of people or personas (contemporary, historical, or fictional)

Creation of novel characters may be allowed as long as they continue to exist solely within the Fedora artwork.

• Should not contain images of pets, or captive or mistreated animals

Technical requirements

• Proposals must be made in PNG format (regardless of source format)

• Proposals must be accompanied by Source files

• Source files must be available in SVG format for vector format submissions, XCF or compressed XCF (xcf.bz2 or xcf.gz) for manipulated bitmaps, or high quality JPEG or PNG for photographic works.

• Any source images, brushes, textures, etc. used in the design must be cited individually, referenced properly (download site, author, license), and be available under a license compatible with CC-BY-SA.

• Submissions for landscape formats must be a minimum of 1920 pixels wide and 1200 pixels high

The larger the better. Photographic submissions should be made at the highest resolution and quality settings the camera is capable of.

• Should be provided in a 16 x 9 aspect ratio

• No watermarks, signatures, photographer/creator names, or messages may be included in any part of the work

Composition

• Should strive for subtlety and poetry
• Avoid high frequency images
  • See (http://forensicphotoshop.blogspot.com/2009/04/low-frequency-vs-high-frequency.html)
  • A soft focus is one way to achieve this

• Do not compete for the user's attention

As the name suggests, visually, it should settle into the "background" of the activity scene. The user's activities (documents, applications) should be the primary focus.

• Fewer details on left side allows for good readability for primary icons on the desktop.
  • Keep in mind that many users have icons covering the entire desktop view.

Specific guidelines

Default background

• The following adjectives should be used to select an appropriate design:
  • Fresh
  • Light
  • Calm
  • Clean
  • Modern
  • Harmonious
  • Unfettered
  • Elegant
  • Graceful
  • Hopeful
  • Delightful
  • Peaceful

Additional Themes

• May use following categories:
  • Nature
  • Landscapes
  • Cosmos
  • Scenes
  • (Region/country specific content)

Also see:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_wallpaper
• Artwork#Fedora_Artwork_Guidelines
• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Documentation/Backgrounds